How to install Ubuntu on Acer’s $199 C7 Chromebook

ChrUbuntu is kind of a mouthful, but helps you get your money's worth.

With our handy guide, you too can make the C7 Chromebook do stuff it wasn't meant to do!

Andrew Cunningham

Maybe you think the price of Acer's new $199 C7 Chromebook is appealing and that the hardware doesn't look bad, but you're a little worried about using Chrome OS to get your work done. Or maybe you're looking for a small, cheap laptop to run Ubuntu, and you're not really interested in buying a computer running a Windows license you'll never use. If either of those sentences describe you and you aren't afraid of the command line, it's actually pretty easy to convert the cheapest Chromebook yet into a nice little Linux laptop.

Because Chromebooks use a special BIOS and bootloader that is distinct from the ones used in standard Windows laptops, you can't use them to boot just any operating system. This is where ChrUbuntu comes in—it's a version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS modified to work with Chrome OS hardware. Once it's installed you should be able to use the C7 to do just about everything you could do with a standard laptop running Ubuntu, and the Chrome OS partition is left on the disk so you can still boot into it and use it if you're so inclined.

These instructions should technically work with any Chromebook, but of all the ones on sale today, the C7 is perhaps best-suited to run alternate operating systems. It comes with a roomy (if slow) hard drive out of the box, and can easily be upgraded with more RAM and an SSD to speed it up. The recent Samsung Chromebooks, by comparison, take a less upgrade-friendly approach.

Preparing the Chromebook

Our first step toward getting ChrUbuntu on the C7 is to put it in developer mode. This is a multi-step process: first, turn your Chromebook off, and then press the power button while holding the Refresh (F3) and Esc keys simultaneously. This will boot the Chromebook into Recovery mode (which you'll also need to use to reload Chrome OS if you replace the hard drive—Google's instructions for creating Chrome OS recovery media are here).

If you booted into Recovery mode properly, you should see a screen telling you to insert recovery media. Instead, you'll want to press Crtl+D to toggle developer mode. This will prompt a reboot and a wait of several minutes while your Chromebook is reset. This will also erase any data on your drive, so proceed with caution if you've got anything you want to keep stored on the Chromebook itself.

After entering developer mode, your Chromebook will boot to a scary screen telling you that OS verification has been disabled. You can either wait until this screen disappears, at which point the laptop will boot into Chrome OS, or you can press Ctrl+D again to bypass it. After loading in developer mode, connect to a wired or wireless network, but don't log in—you still have to install the developer mode BIOS before you can install an alternate OS.

At the login screen, press Ctrl+Alt and the Forward (F2) button to bring up the Developer Console command prompt. At the "localhost login" prompt, enter chronos and press Enter. Type sudo bash and press enter, and then chromeos-firmwareupdate --mode=todev. If you see a message telling you that you can press Ctrl+U to run your own self-signed OS kernels, you're ready to install ChrUbuntu!

Installing ChrUbuntu

Type exit to take a step back to the chronos user command prompt. Now, we'll need to download and install the ChrUbuntu files. As of this writing, you'll need to type wget http://goo.gl/i817v; sudo bash i817v and press enter to initiate the setup process, but you may want to check the ChrUbuntu blog to make sure a newer version hasn't been released.

The installer will check to make sure you're running a developer BIOS and show you a message about using an unofficial Chromium OS kernel to enable 64-bit functionality. You won't need to worry about any of this, so just press Enter to continue.

You'll now need to decide what size to make your Ubuntu partition, which will depend on whether you've replaced the built-in hard drive with an SSD. I'm still using the stock 320GB hard drive, so the maximum size recommended by the installer was 292GB; I entered 290GB just to give Chrome OS a little extra breathing room.

Press Enter and the system will partition your disk, reboot, and begin running through Chrome OS's first-time setup process again. You'll have to repeat a few of the steps from above—connect to a network, and press Crtl+Alt+F2 again without logging in. Type chronos to login, and then wget http://goo.gl/i817v; sudo bash i817v to start the ChrUbuntu installer again. Now that you've partitioned your disk, the OS files will begin downloading—the complete size of the download is about 1GB, so it will take some time.

Once the install is completed, the computer will reboot into a fully functional Ubuntu install with a default username and password that are both set to "user." These should probably be changed or deleted.

If you reboot your Chromebook, by default it will continue to boot into Chrome OS, which lives on in its own dedicated partition. If you'd like ChrUbuntu to be the default, open up the Terminal in ChrUbuntu (or the Developer Console command prompt in Chrome OS) and enter sudo cgpt add -i 6 -P 5 -S 1 /dev/sda to change the default boot partition. Changing it back to Chrome OS is as easy as disabling developer mode when you boot the Chromebook, or entering sudo cgpt add -i 6 -P 0 -S 1 /dev/sda at the terminal.

How does it do?

Enlarge/ That screen still isn't the best we've ever seen, but you'd be hard pressed to find a cheaper laptop that's better suited for Ubuntu.

Andrew Cunningham

Once you've got Ubuntu running on the C7, it works just as a standard laptop running Ubuntu would. You can install and run anything from the Ubuntu Software Center or other sources and you have full access to the filesystem, making the C7 a much more versatile computer than it is with just Chrome OS installed.

Happily, all of the major hardware—Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio, the webcam, and the GPU—appears to be working normally, and the Chromebook's function keys also perform as they do in Chrome OS. This means that games and video content should play normally, and the laptop goes into and out of sleep mode without a hitch.

The trackpad is a bit problematic, however: tap-to-click works fine but two-finger scrolling doesn't. You'll also probably run into some edge cases where things don't work perfectly. Video out over HDMI works, for example, and Ubuntu has multi-monitor and extended desktop support, but audio over HDMI doesn't appear to work as intended. Battery life also continues to be a weak point for the C7—in our testing it gets a little under four hours in Chrome OS, and while we didn't have time to perform extensive scientific testing under Ubuntu, the numbers should be similar or perhaps slightly worse.

The ChrUbuntu blog put out a call for C7 testers a few weeks ago—if you're using ChrUbuntu on the C7 and are experiencing problems, that's the place to report them.

Whither Windows?

We noted in the original review that the C7 Chromebook was just a lightly modified version of one of Acer's Windows laptops, the Aspire One 756. Using some BIOS files intended for that model, I spent some time trying to replace the Chromebook BIOS with the standard one to allow for booting of Windows and other operating systems not supported by the Chromebooks' boot loader.

Unfortunately, such an operation is more complicated than it seems. Standard Acer laptops have a "crisis boot" mode that allows for emergency re-flashing of the BIOS, but that doesn't work on a Chromebook. The Linux flashrom utility used in Chrome OS doesn't support flashing the BIOS ROMs you can download from Acer's support site.

Finally, even if you could find a BIOS file compatible with flashrom, the C7's BIOS appears to be hardware-locked, which is standard for Chromebooks. The original Cr-48 Chromebook prototype had BIOS protection that could be bypassed by applying some electrical tape to the motherboard, but the C7 doesn't have any such quick fix that I could find. It's probable that more enterprising minds will be able to figure out how to convert the C7 into a cheap run-anything laptop, but in the hours I spent trying to unlock the laptop I was unable to do so easily. If you'd like to run Windows apps on the C7, the most feasible solution is probably going to be a virtualization program like VirtualBox, which installs and runs without issue on the C7 once Ubuntu is up and running.

Promoted Comments

I'd be very interested if someone got Mint running on one of these. I'm not a fan of Unity at all, and am all about the Cinnamon desktop.

You don't have to actually install Mint though, since you can easily install Cinnamon, MATE, or other desktop on Ubuntu and forget about Unity. I'm using Cinnamon on my Ubuntu laptop and love it. MATE would probably be great for the Chromebook since it is much less resource-intensive than Unity.

<blockquote>Maybe you think the price of Acer's new $199 C7 Chromebook is appealing and that the hardware doesn't look bad, but you're a little worried about using Chrome OS to get your work done ... Or maybe you're looking for a small, cheap laptop to run Ubuntu</blockquote> ...Or, maybe both Chrome_OS or Ubuntu are a wee-bit scary as they tend to farm all your information to a large corporation, and would rather install: Debian, Arch, Gentoo ?

sorry about the paranoia. it's a great article really - thankee! the more linux related articles the better.

My (limited) understanding of the issue is that Ubuntu Unity searches are forwarded to Amazon... so I assume that if you don't use Unity, nothing is reported. If I'm wrong on that, let me know - I've been hacking more normal desktops on Unbuntu builds for some time.

My (limited) understanding of the issue is that Ubuntu Unity searches are forwarded to Amazon... so I assume that if you don't use Unity, nothing is reported. If I'm wrong on that, let me know - I've been hacking more normal desktops on Unbuntu builds for some time.

That's correct, or alternatively you can just uninstall the package that does the Amazon stuff. I don't remember the package name, but you can look it up online.

My (limited) understanding of the issue is that Ubuntu Unity searches are forwarded to Amazon... so I assume that if you don't use Unity, nothing is reported. If I'm wrong on that, let me know - I've been hacking more normal desktops on Unbuntu builds for some time.

That's correct, or alternatively you can just uninstall the package that does the Amazon stuff. I don't remember the package name, but you can look it up online.

Still struggling with how $199 reaches £199 over in the UK... At about 1.6$:£ and 20% vat (sales tax) that should only be £150. I don't suppose it's actually made in the US, so it's not like shipping costs should be much different :-( Where does the extra 1/3 come from?

Dear Commenters, like the article says, we are talking about Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. A really nice, secure and easy to use operation system, which I am self using alot for my private and professional computing.

So first of all, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has no Amazon search included into the Unity Dash. Secondly, you can switch the Amazon search off by clicking on deactivate online search in the settings of Unity. So either way, you haven't to worry or uninstall anything.

I am very glad to read your comments. But next time when you comment on something, pls ask when you don't know something for sure or otherwise inform yourself before you write something stupid. Thanks alot!

Hmm, seems that the Samsung ARM-based machine also runs Linux pretty well, although with similar trackpad problems, no need to fool around in the bios, and $50 more price. I wonder which would wind up being more bang for buck...

Hmm, seems that the Samsung ARM-based machine also runs Linux pretty well, although with similar trackpad problems, no need to fool around in the bios, and $50 more price. I wonder which would wind up being more bang for buck...

Biggest concern there would probably be the size of the local storage (16GB I think, minus the few GB you lose by keeping Chrome OS). You could probably get around it with an SD card but it's something to think about.

I'd be very interested if someone got Mint running on one of these. I'm not a fan of Unity at all, and am all about the Cinnamon desktop.

You don't have to actually install Mint though, since you can easily install Cinnamon, MATE, or other desktop on Ubuntu and forget about Unity. I'm using Cinnamon on my Ubuntu laptop and love it. MATE would probably be great for the Chromebook since it is much less resource-intensive than Unity.

This will also erase any data on your drive, so proceed with caution if you've got anything you want to keep stored on the Chromebook itself.

Heh, a common “ready, fire, aim” mistake. Should be “precede this with caution if…”

Exactly why?

The advice that the action will erase all data came AFTER explaining how to do it. In my role as cubicle worker bee, I often get advice such as erasing all my cookie files when I turn to IT for help (since we don't get admin rights on our machines). Gotta question every step BEFORE proceeding.

I'd be very interested if someone got Mint running on one of these. I'm not a fan of Unity at all, and am all about the Cinnamon desktop.

You don't have to actually install Mint though, since you can easily install Cinnamon, MATE, or other desktop on Ubuntu and forget about Unity. I'm using Cinnamon on my Ubuntu laptop and love it. MATE would probably be great for the Chromebook since it is much less resource-intensive than Unity.

I'm well aware you can install different desktop environments on Ubuntu but it is a matter of preference. It shouldn't be hard to get Mint running since it is technically a fork of Ubuntu. I just don't approve of the direction Canonical is taking Linux and would prefer not to use their distro.

I'd be very interested if someone got Mint running on one of these. I'm not a fan of Unity at all, and am all about the Cinnamon desktop.

You don't have to actually install Mint though, since you can easily install Cinnamon, MATE, or other desktop on Ubuntu and forget about Unity. I'm using Cinnamon on my Ubuntu laptop and love it. MATE would probably be great for the Chromebook since it is much less resource-intensive than Unity.

I'm well aware you can install different desktop environments on Ubuntu but it is a matter of preference. It shouldn't be hard to get Mint running since it is technically a fork of Ubuntu. I just don't approve of the direction Canonical is taking Linux and would prefer not to use their distro.

So many people are MSwindows blinded, You do not have to load a whole other distro from scratch. If the repo for ChrUbuntu is a full repo, you can install another desktop either concurrently or install a new one and delete the old one. That is what I did till I dumped it to go back to debian on my desktop..

Am I the only one who thinks Chrome OS is the right choice for this kind of hardware? This machine isn't really made for doing real work except maybe browsing the web and watching youtube. And if you need to connect to a different machine you do have decent ssh client for the chrome browser.

Dear Commenters, like the article says, we are talking about Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. A really nice, secure and easy to use operation system, which I am self using alot for my private and professional computing.

So first of all, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has no Amazon search included into the Unity Dash. Secondly, you can switch the Amazon search off by clicking on deactivate online search in the settings of Unity. So either way, you haven't to worry or uninstall anything.

I am very glad to read your comments. But next time when you comment on something, pls ask when you don't know something for sure or otherwise inform yourself before you write something stupid. Thanks alot!

I seem to have missed it, how well does it run? You mention that the drivers are a bit wonky, but largely work.

But how about a paragraph on its subjective feel? Does it feel like a an old netbook, newer thin and light? Somewhere in between?

Newer thin-and-light mostly - the 1.1GHz Celeron has a bit more in common with the chips used in Ultrabooks than the chips used in netbooks. You'll probably want a RAM upgrade before doing any serious work on it, but it runs quickly enough for basic tasks as-is.

Or even XFCE. I'm quite please with the performance and stability of XFCE 4.8 and higher that Linux Mint 13 uses. All the usability bugs squashed and I haven't had any problems. Good by Windows.

Lea_8 wrote:

Anticrawl wrote:

I'd be very interested if someone got Mint running on one of these. I'm not a fan of Unity at all, and am all about the Cinnamon desktop.

You don't have to actually install Mint though, since you can easily install Cinnamon, MATE, or other desktop on Ubuntu and forget about Unity. I'm using Cinnamon on my Ubuntu laptop and love it. MATE would probably be great for the Chromebook since it is much less resource-intensive than Unity.

Still struggling with how $199 reaches £199 over in the UK... At about 1.6$:£ and 20% vat (sales tax) that should only be £150. I don't suppose it's actually made in the US, so it's not like shipping costs should be much different :-( Where does the extra 1/3 come from?

High taxes in Europe together with subsidizing our friends from the US make for the very high prices of electronics in Europe.

By the way, Europe is a bigger market for electronics than the US. In 2010-2011 Europe had 28% while the US were second with 21% market share.

For a long time all my systems were a dual-boot environment of Ubuntu & Windows. Due to some of the directions Canonical has been moving in and after reflecting on some things that SHOULD just work or be fairly straight forward to accomplish with minimal headache, I re-investigated Fedora after several years of not messing with it. All my systems aside from one are now either straight Fedora or dual-boot Fedora/Windows. I think it would be awesome to get Fedora or CentOS up and running on one of these.

For a long time all my systems were a dual-boot environment of Ubuntu & Windows. Due to some of the directions Canonical has been moving in and after reflecting on some things that SHOULD just work or be fairly straight forward to accomplish with minimal headache, I re-investigated Fedora after several years of not messing with it.

I have tried again and again to switch to Fedora. I really like the Fedora development community better, and I too have been unhappy with the decisions Canonical has made and the direction they seem to be heading. Each time though, I find myself switching back to Ubuntu. I'm comfortable with it, and for me it seems to "just work" more consistently.

Maybe if I used my linux system more, I'd be more willing to make the effort to switch. As it stands though, I use Windows at work, Mac OS at home, OpenBSD on my server, and Ubuntu on an old netbook that I rarely use. So far I'm inclined to leave well enough alone.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.